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I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force th

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas. Twitter should: - Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees. - Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts. This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text. - Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done. - Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups. - More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX). - Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.

Benjammer 10y ago
Apart from layoffs, how do you see your other ideas adding business value and/or revenue to the company rather than just making the product better for end users? Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Good question. So I think my suggestions would make it a better product but I think if you can create better ways to engage others you can make Twitter more sticky. The more sticky the users are the more ads you can show them. For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1]. But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-studies-comparing-twitter-with-facebook-in-charts https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-...
throwaw12ay 10y ago
Thinking about it, Twitter barely evolved since its inception. At least changes are barely noticeable on the website in terms of features or UX. And I agreee with you, it's impossible to follow a discussion on Twitter. It is almost impossible to know who is answering to whom when tweets pile up.
throwaway420 10y ago
It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software. As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons. 1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them. 2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust. Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
- throwaw12ay 10y ago
  > It might be too late for devs to trust them again, Stupid mistake from Twitter. Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.
flukus 10y ago
> Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. How will that go down with investors expecting growth?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Considering layoffs typically increase stock prices in the short term, help increase profits in the short term, I would imagine short term investors would be happy. Long term investors it's hard to say because trimming the fat allows you to try much, much longer than you could have before. Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.
  - firebones 10y ago
    Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple unless you can a) articulate which employees contribute to revenue, and b) take into account the compensation/option-based expense. Make a mistake and you not only affect revenues (by cutting those contributing to revenue) but also cutting the ability to retain those remaining who actually do contribute to revenue. No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      > Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it would be simple at all. Unfortunately I have no way to give you a good answer here. They have a disproportionately large amount of engineers and other staff compared to the product(s) they offer but without internal information regarding groups, compensations, etc there is no way I could ever begin to answer this as an outside. > No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side. I disagree. The best I can find Twitter currently has 2,900 - 3,000 employees (they had a high of 3,900 the best I can tell). What products and solutions do they have? Almost none with almost no evolution to show for the past 5+ years. They are extremely employee heavy. Granted I can't know for sure how their internals work but 900 employees should be able to not only run but to evolve the platform without issue, even including sales and marketing. Far more company have done much more with much less than that.
Jabbles 10y ago
The problem is to make Twitter worth at least $20B. I don't see an obvious link between your suggestions and that outcome.
metaphorm 10y ago
better question is whether or not Twitter _should_ be turned around. it seems like at this point it's a second rate advertising platform that encourages abuse and degeneration of public discourse.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  I think it should. It's such a useful tool for quick communication of real time events. It's hard to imagine anything replacing it anytime soon and it does have a significant amount of users, even if it isn't growing much if at all. You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)

Benjammer 10y ago

Apart from layoffs, how do you see your other ideas adding business value and/or revenue to the company rather than just making the product better for end users? Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Good question. So I think my suggestions would make it a better product but I think if you can create better ways to engage others you can make Twitter more sticky. The more sticky the users are the more ads you can show them. For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1]. But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-studies-comparing-twitter-with-facebook-in-charts https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-...

throwaw12ay 10y ago

Thinking about it, Twitter barely evolved since its inception. At least changes are barely noticeable on the website in terms of features or UX. And I agreee with you, it's impossible to follow a discussion on Twitter. It is almost impossible to know who is answering to whom when tweets pile up.

throwaway420 10y ago

It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software. As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons. 1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them. 2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust. Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
throwaw12ay 10y ago
> It might be too late for devs to trust them again, Stupid mistake from Twitter. Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.

flukus 10y ago

> Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. How will that go down with investors expecting growth?

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Considering layoffs typically increase stock prices in the short term, help increase profits in the short term, I would imagine short term investors would be happy. Long term investors it's hard to say because trimming the fat allows you to try much, much longer than you could have before. Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.
- firebones 10y ago
  Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple unless you can a) articulate which employees contribute to revenue, and b) take into account the compensation/option-based expense. Make a mistake and you not only affect revenues (by cutting those contributing to revenue) but also cutting the ability to retain those remaining who actually do contribute to revenue. No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it would be simple at all. Unfortunately I have no way to give you a good answer here. They have a disproportionately large amount of engineers and other staff compared to the product(s) they offer but without internal information regarding groups, compensations, etc there is no way I could ever begin to answer this as an outside. > No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side. I disagree. The best I can find Twitter currently has 2,900 - 3,000 employees (they had a high of 3,900 the best I can tell). What products and solutions do they have? Almost none with almost no evolution to show for the past 5+ years. They are extremely employee heavy. Granted I can't know for sure how their internals work but 900 employees should be able to not only run but to evolve the platform without issue, even including sales and marketing. Far more company have done much more with much less than that.

Jabbles 10y ago

The problem is to make Twitter worth at least $20B. I don't see an obvious link between your suggestions and that outcome.

metaphorm 10y ago

better question is whether or not Twitter _should_ be turned around. it seems like at this point it's a second rate advertising platform that encourages abuse and degeneration of public discourse.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I think it should. It's such a useful tool for quick communication of real time events. It's hard to imagine anything replacing it anytime soon and it does have a significant amount of users, even if it isn't growing much if at all. You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)